Download: Creating and Customizing TFS Reports

Buck Hodges

I don’t often post about reporting.  My last post was about sample reports for TFS from a year ago.

If you are trying to understand it or just get more out of it, there are now more resources to help you.  On Friday (Aug. 10, 2007), a new article on TFS reporting became available for downloading.

Creating and Customizing TFS Reports

Brief Description

This article provides an introduction to the important concepts and step by step instructions to Create and Customize Reports for Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Overview

If you’ve used Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server (TFS), you may have seen reports that you would like to customize. Working with reports can be very intimidating because it uses different technologies that you may not be familiar with. This article provides an introduction to the important concepts you’ll need to learn a “minimal path” through the technologies. Reporting in TFS is built on top of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. You’ll also need some additional tools on top of Visual Studio, such as Business Intelligence Development Studio.

Instructions

1. Download the zip file and extract the contents to a folder on your
   computer. The zip file contains the following items:
   1. PDF Document: Creating and Customizing TFS Reports.pdf
   2. TFS Reports
      1. Bug Trends.rdl
      2. Remaining Work by Count.rdl
      3. Remaining Work by Size.rdl
      4. Status by Area.rdl
   3. PDF Documents explaining the TFS reports
      1. Bugs Trends.pdf (for Bug Trends.rdl report)
      2. Remaining Work.pdf (for Remaining Work by Count.rdl and
         Remaining Work by Size.rdl reports)
      3. Status by Area.pdf (for Status by Area.rdl report)
   4. PDF Document: How To Install a Report to TFS Project.pdf
   5. readme.txt
2. Follow the directions in the readme.txt

Other great resources for learning about reporting include the following post with some screencasts by Jimmy Li, one of the developers working on TFS reporting.

Understanding the TFS Cube

The initial learning curve for the TFS Cube is pretty steep. It is quite overwhelming to figure out the relationships between the large number of dimensions and measure groups in the TFS cube at first. In this blog entry I will explain some of the most commonly used perspectives and show how you can easily create Excel reports from them. 

*Note* that this blog entry is still relevant to you even if you don’t have perspectives on your cube.  What I cover here will help you better understand the cube schema.  In the demos below I connect Excel to cube perspectives.  However you can create the exact same reports by connecting to the Team System Cube.

more…

Mauli Shah, a tester for TFS reporting, posted a collection of links of reporting resources.

Ameya Bhatawdekar, program manager for TFS reporting, wrote a post on how to do reporting with Visio: Team Foundation Server Reporting and Visio.

If you have feedback on what you would like to see in TFS reporting, be sure to contact Ameya or leave a comment on his blog.

Enjoy!

Buck Hodges Director of Engineering, Azure

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